The Fair Housing Act outlawed discrimination but not its lingering effects
Evidence
Racially restrictive covenants were used by white homeowners for years, though eventually race discrimination in housing was made illegal when Congress passed and President Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act. (Incidentally, or not, the act was signed one week after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.) But while the Fair Housing Act made racial discrimination illegal, it fell short of eliminating all vestiges of racial discrimination in housing—as black Americans who have sought to purchase a home are well aware. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 175
Categorization
- CANDY: The parenthetical that the Fair Housing Act was signed one week after King’s assassination is a striking nugget.
- XREF: connects to: Housing-market discrimination makes purportedly free market choices illusory — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 317; Post-1964 racial discrimination persists in subtler forms as laws are overturned — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 422; Fair housing laws failed to dismantle entrenched urban segregation. — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 475 (+12 more)
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Housing-market discrimination makes purportedly free market choices illusory — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 317; Post-1964 racial discrimination persists in subtler forms as laws are overturned — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 422; Fair housing laws failed to dismantle entrenched urban segregation. — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 475 (+12 more)
Broader Connections
- Outlawing housing discrimination did not erase its accumulated vestiges.
#expands(0.96) — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 1231 - Legal anti-discrimination shifted, not removed, the forces suppressing black home values.
#corroborates(0.93) — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 209 - Anti-discrimination laws did not reset artificially created housing wealth gaps
#expands(0.92) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1365